“I think eleventh place is a bit better than expected, because at the end of the day, Seb pulled out a magnificent lap. Jaime?óÔé¼Ôäós position is a more accurate reflection of our standing, even if he did not get it quite right for whatever reason.

“It was a difficult session as the temperatures were higher and the car was tail-happy, so Jaime was unable to manage the tyres in the final sector, but like I said Seb did a superb lap with our aggressive choice of only doing one lap on that final run.”

He briefly held eighth at the start before Felipe Massa passed him around the outside of turn five. Then Jenson Button demoted him to tenth on lap five.

He pitted early on lap nine and although he was again able to make one pit stop fewer than his team mate, it required a 23-lap run on hards at the end of the race. Although he was significantly more competitive on the hard tyres than Alguersuari, he fell to 14th at the end of the race after being passed by Adrian Sutil.

Buemi said: “I managed to run at a good pace, but I think we were a bit unlucky to lose a lot of time when I got lapped. Also our strategy was not quite perfect and on top of that, we were generally a little bit too slow and Force India and Sauber beat us fair and square.”

Was one of seven drivers to make four stops as he had more problems with tyre degradation:

“After around 12 laps my tyres were gone, which is why I ended up doing a four stop race. Overall, in terms of my lap times, maybe this race was very slightly more positive than the last one in Turkey.

“We really need to deal with the tyre degradation and there is a lot of work still to do, if we are to be competitive and fighting for points.”

The Pirelli-tyres seem to reveal Alguersuari’s weakness: for some reason he is very hard on the tyres. Or maybe the Toro Rosso is very tyre-unfriendly, as both drivers usually finish several places lower than they started.

It’s all very well blaming tyres – Massa struggled last year and he’s improved markedly since, but there is a school of thought that Liuzzi struggled on last year’s Bridgestones and he wasn’t given much of a chance to prove that it was the tyres rather than him.

I don’t think that there’s much between the two drivers in terms of absolute speed/performance.